


pirouette

by newsbypostcard



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Dancing, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-20 06:20:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5994649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or: Five times Kaidan caught Shepard dancing, and four times she tried vociferously to deny it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pirouette

**Author's Note:**

> missing vancouver a lot lately. not sure what to do with those feelings, so obviously that meant it was time to channel this loser.
> 
> ♪♫ this is not the first time i've written a dancing-themed fic and i can't tell you i regret the repetition because i doooooon't ♫♪

  


  


**i.**

The first time Kaidan catches a hint that Shepard might have a better grasp on rhythm than she lets on, they’re jogging through the Citadel.

It’s a damn good thing that Kaidan doesn’t hate running, because Shepard runs _everywhere_. She always has, right from the early days, and he’s always respected and begrudged the challenge she’s always offered him in just asking him to keep up. Sometimes it was the kind of clip that had him panting and trying desperately to keep a grasp on his ability to form complete sentences; sometimes it was just barely above a walk, something that came to feel leisurely after enough time under her command -- despite that the same pace had, in basic training, been offered as a form of punishment. 

To run at such a pace, then, with as much armour and weaponry as one generally carried when part of Shepard’s crew ... was definitely a challenge.

But Kaidan met it. He met it cheerfully. He rose to it every day.

When they’d been together, Shepard had passed the time _between_ missions building her already considerable muscle mass, too. “We use the Mako too much,” she’d told him between pushups when he’d caught her half an hour into a workout in the cargo hold one memorable morning; and he’d watched her lift herself from the ground a dozen or so times before getting to the floor beside her, as though asking to be beaten handily. And he had; a truly pathetic number of pushups later, he could barely manage to raise himself off the floor with shaking forearms, and Shepard had given him a sidelong glance and grinned at him before switching to chinups without so much as a moment to breathe. 

It had been true; in those days, they had done more sitting. It wasn’t that they weren’t fit; they were plenty fit. They’d just had less to get done in every day, and one of the things he and Shepard had had in common was that they interpreted competition as one possible form of foreplay, and so they’d had time for those workouts. 

They don’t have that time anymore.

Kaidan’s no stranger to running; he knows well the slopes of Vancouver’s North Shore mountains. He could, and had, run mountain marathons with semi-regularity, always finishing in pretty respectable times. It’s just that he hadn’t typically worn armour while running this much before. So, yeah. Running after Shepard with thirty pounds of plating attached to his person: definitely something that had taken some getting used to.

Still -- he stopped complaining pretty quick. The thing about it was -- when Shepard ran everywhere, she always looked flushed wherever she got there, and it was a look that almost made all the running worth it. She did her business with a hint of a smirk on her face, with a spark in her eye, with shining skin that gave her the kind of appearance that still attracted him beyond measure, even after years of serving in the Marines. On Shepard, it was almost like new, this active, commanding appearance -- but then that was true of pretty much everything about her, wasn’t it? Kaidan thought it was probably just all the elements he found attractive put together in one person, who was also, conveniently, just objectively beautiful. She always had been the whole package.

But these days -- she doesn’t shine anymore. Not in the same way.

It’s -- not that she looks different. She doesn’t, even despite the… _reconstruction_. She’s more serious, now -- tired -- and Kaidan thinks that if she’d only stop running everywhere, she might get that spark back. 

If she took more time, he thinks, maybe… 

Anyway. 

It doesn’t really matter why. The point is: it’s three years later, and they still run everywhere.

And these days, it’s definitely easier than it used to be to keep up. It helps that he’s amped up his own fitness considerably in the time since, and maybe it helps, too, that her own slower pace is more prevalent. Kaidan doesn’t find this heartening; quite the opposite. It’s like the fatigue Shepard spends all her time trying to roll out of her joints is holding her back -- like she’s not so eager to greet the world with those eyes lit afire anymore.

 _Anyway_. It doesn’t matter _why_. 

(It does.) 

Regardless, the fact is that he keeps his breath and wits about him better this time around… in some respects, anyway.

From time to time, when he forgets to keep himself in check, Kaidan thinks he might even be able to keep up with Shepard these days in more than just running -- given the chance. Then, immediately, he forces himself to stop thinking about that, and everything else about her. It’s just -- the way her hips move; the way they slope to form the line of her waist; the way her back -- the way her back _side_ \--

 _Running._ Running is good. He should focus on the running.

And it is different than it was, the running -- much like the nature of his relationship with Shepard. And Kaidan is a _god damned professional,_ so he is entirely capable of separating the past from the present, clearly. They are running through the Citadel. And if it turns out that Kaidan still lacks his fucking wits about him after all, he at least, three years later, really can keep his breath.

Seeking distraction, Kaidan eyes wander as they jog by the shops. It’s only like this, driven to seek distraction, that he notices his pace keeps adjusting. It’s as though every time they pass a shop, he speeds up, then slows again, all to keep Shepard within the peripheral distance he’s decided is professional without being negligent -- and he figures out after a while that it’s not just _his_ pace that’s adjusting -- it’s _Shepard’s_. He’s just following her lead.

Either she is doing it on purpose, or she is -- dare he say it -- _undisciplined_.

Kaidan’s eyes drop to her feet. If Shepard is flagging in her ability to command, it’s technically his responsibility as the ranking officer aboard to take over. Is she stumbling? Is it…

But as Kaidan’s feet fall into time behind hers, it doesn’t take him long to figure out that the pace of her feet perfectly matches the beat of the music within whatever store they happen to pass.

_Holy shit._

Is he imagining this? Has she been doing this all along? He doesn’t bother to try to obscure the fact that he’s checking her out anymore, only this time it’s in genuine curiosity. Her shoulders seem to twist from side to side, on occasion, when the beat gets slower and closer to jazzy; and Kaidan imagines she might be humming along to herself, at least in her head, as her heavily plated feet hit the ground again and again. It’s as though she were kicking the bass drum herself.

Kaidan is in awe. He barely stifles a delighted laugh and settles for keeping pace behind her for as long as he can in genuine admiration, and as Shepard looks to the side and leads them into a Sirta Foundation shop, it takes her approximately fifteen seconds to realize that Kaidan is standing oddly to the side, grinning at her.

“What?” she asks him. Her breath is just barely laboured, and -- he’d swear it -- she’s still trying to quell it in time with the music.

“Nothing,” he says lightly. He does his level best to get his face back under his command. “Say, this music sound familiar to you?”

“No,” Shepard says, looking away from him.

“You sure? Well, I like it, anyway.”

“I didn’t notice it.”

“No?” The grin wins out; he raises a gloved fist and presses it against his lips. “So you’re definitely not tapping your foot right now.”

The foot stops.

“You’re mistaken,” she mutters; and there is no disguising the threat.

The thrill in Kaidan’s gut is immediate. It is fierce. He’d give his left arm to be able to kiss her right now. “You know, Shepard -- it’s really understandable. Who among us hasn’t shaken their booty from time to time?”

“Please stop,” Shepard mutters, eyes scanning over the options on the screen. Vega gives a sudden burst of laughter behind them; and given that she’s scrolling right past the medi-gel upgrades he knows she’s after, he’s willing to bet that she’s just doing something to discourage observation of any evidence that she, _Shepard_ , could even once be embarrassed in her life.

“Uh-huh,” he says only, and he sets an open hand against his mouth to cover as much evidence of his amusement as possible. “Understood.”

So he keeps his mouth shut for the next five minutes, anyway, even when Shepard gives him a singular warning glance and otherwise does not look at him at all; but when they take off again, Kaidan watches her feet fall easily and indisputably back in time with the beat as though by mere habit with unconcealable joy.

He’s utterly and completely fucked -- that is instantly clear to him. There’s no stopping him from watching her now. He won’t do it intently, and not _weirdly_ either -- just enough to figure out how much rhythm she actually has. He has to know. _He has to know._

But at the same time -- for Shepard’s sake as much as his own -- he swears he’ll die with this secret if it kills him to do it.

 

  


  


  


**ii.**

Insomnia, like almost daily near-death experience, is a fact of life at this point.

Kaidan misses Earth all the time. He misses it _all_ the time. This mission is different from all its predecessors in that respect; he’s never longed to be on Earth so fiercely before. Something about the fact that his home is being destroyed, being colonized, by Reapers just a little bit more with every passing day -- it sets off the nostalgia centres of his brain as much as it stimulates his sense of vengeance. He not only wants to destroy the creatures that are taking his home apart, but he wants the chance to go back to his home just as badly -- to run the North Shore mountains, to head to the Sunshine Coast another weekend, to wake up Earth’s sunrise even just once more.

He just… misses it. Little things about it, especially about Vancouver. The way the air smells when the rain socks in. The way, on foggy mornings, the only accompaniment to his morning run is the sound of his own footfalls on gently gravelled walkways. The way the sun feels like a refuge on the few days a year it manages to peek its way out from all of that cloud.

He never feels more this way than he does in the early mornings.

It doesn’t help that he dreams about it.

He might not be a morning person when he’s in space, but whenever he’s on Earth he manages to wake up just before the sun anyway. With his parents’ condo on English Bay, it’s an easy walk to the water’s edge -- and there’s nothing he loves first thing in the morning more than to shut his eyes against the sound of the water lapping against the shore, to open them again to the sun illuminating the hills and the mountains behind fuel tankers anchored offshore, and to take a cup of coffee atop a boulder by the water’s edge.

This morning, he dreamed First Beach was being torn apart by Reapers. 

He woke up, as though he was there. When his heart ached with homesickness, he had swung his feet over the side of his bunk and opted to take a walk instead of to re-descend back into the dream.

The ship is silent, apart from the occasional gentle beep of the ship’s computer getting things done. The new Normandy is at once large and small to him. He’d checked it out while it was still docked on Earth, for the most part -- oversaw the dismantling of the Cerberus tech, just to see for himself that it was really done. He’d wound up spending hours in what had been First Officer Lawson’s office, poring over files, trying to find answers about Shepard once and for all -- so it’s oddly that office that he’s most familiar with, of anything. He’d checked out Shepard’s quarters a bit, too, not least because they’d been slated to be _his_ quarters until she got sprung from containment and he’d gotten his dumb ass beaten up by a Cerberus robot (talk about irony). It had all still been full of her things, anyway -- or what was left from the Alliance’s purge -- so he’d avoided spending too much time up there, lest he trip over some feelings and wind up three years emotionally devolved.

That’s hardly a problem anymore, thank god, but the rest of the ship… is weird. It’s still weird. It’s _too_ weird, a lot of the time, but fortunately he’s mostly too busy to think about it. Things are better that way. Otherwise he gets stuck here, in this too-big too-small space, unable to think clearly without the grey of atmosphere and cloud cover.

At a loss in the empty mess, he takes the lift down to the cargo bay, deciding it’s probably the most open part of the ship available to him. He thinks he might get in one of those workouts he’s been thinking about lately, do something about this urge to run along the seawall --

But he doesn’t expect Shepard to already be there.

She’s over in Vega’s pit, the sounds of weapon disassembly easily covering the sound of the lift doors opening. Her back is to him; she’s fully dressed, her hair tied back, and Kaidan’s not sure if she’s already up or if she just never slept.

He hangs back for a while, trying to figure out whether to approach or to leave her alone. She might’ve heard the lift carry him down after all, _or_ she might genuinely not know he’s there. Is it weirder to approach her just to let her know he’s leaving her alone, or is it weirder to leave without even acknowledging that he’s shown up? The latter, he decides, is definitely weirder if she knows he’s there and just isn’t acknowledging it, but--

Over the sound of the pistol being dismantled, Kaidan suddenly hears the line of some melody.

Shepard is -- _humming_.

It’s a low thing, at once exactly what he would’ve expected from Shepard and so far from it that Kaidan feels the need to grip onto something to keep himself stable. A couple of notes as she peers into the barrel for some evidence of residue, then another trill as she picks up the stock and examines its port for cleanliness. The measure repeats; she looks to the side for some cloth or equipment -- 

And then, in stocking feet and humming all the while, Shepard raises herself onto her toes and _pirouettes_ toward the cloth she needs.

Kaidan, aloud, _gasps._

Shepard turns suddenly, looks up, falls back on her heels -- and the moment is gone.

“Kaidan,” she says. Her voice is still low, still caught in the lower registers of the song, and Kaidan is… verklempt.

“I’m sorry,” he grinds out, after a second; then, all emotion he’s ever felt seemingly balling into one, he offers a ghost of a laugh. “ _Please_ don’t let me interrupt.”

“I wasn’t--” Shepard stops, after that. 

Kaidan can feel the pulse in his throat. “Dancing?” he prompts. He swallows. His eyes stay fixed on her, even though his instincts tell him it’s time to go. Why is he reacting like this?

“I was cleaning my pistol.” She gestures.

“Yeah.” He nods. “I get that. I really… didn’t mean to interrupt. I’m sorry. You should continue.”

There’s a purse in her lips that he can’t quite read, like to have been caught in a moment of -- what? beauty? vulnerability? -- is mortifying to her, in some way. “Do you need something?” she asks him.

“No,” he says immediately. “I couldn’t sleep, so I just came down here to… think, or work out, or clean guns or something, god, Shepard, I don’t know. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“I didn’t see you there.”

“No, yeah, I’ve figured that out. I _really_ didn’t mean to interrupt.” He waves a hand. “I was just going. I’ll go. I should go. You should… stay. You stay and do whatever you... do, and I’ll -- go.”

“Kaidan,” Shepard says; and her voice is a sigh, exasperation pulling at its edges. Kaidan’s relieved; this feels like reality, now, this feels _normal_ , with Shepard’s hand rubbing tiredly at her forehead as though she can’t figure him out. “Why are you acting like you’ve walked in on me naked?”

 _Because I have,_ he thinks.

“No reason,” he says.

“Major, it’s 0330. Let’s keep it real?”

His hand is still planted on the requisitions console, so, sure. He probably has the physical stability to deal with this. “I just obviously interrupted you when you thought you were alone. You’re a private person. I didn’t mean to disrupt your morning.”

“No disruption,” she says evenly.

“I mean… you seemed happy.”

“Cleaning guns is cathartic.”

“You know, we have people for that.” He cracks a smile.

“Yeah.” She nods. “Well, you’re not the only one with insomnia around here.”

A silence falls -- thick and cloying, like early-morning fog.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he says eventually. His voice is quiet; his smile is slight; his heart is still pounding.

She at him blinks with an air of utterly uncharacteristic innocence. “Clean guns?” she asks, blandly.

“The--” he twirls a finger in place. “Pirouette. Do you dance?”

“The what?”

“You -- moved from there--” he points-- “to there, but in a spinny motion.”

“Are you referring to the walking I did?”

“Nnno…” He narrows his eyes at her. “I’m referring to some pretty sick ballet shit, actually. I’ve seen you spin, Shepard, but never like that. You were, like, up on tippy toes. It was seriously cool.”

She nods knowingly. “You mean the regular walking I did from place to place.”

“No.” His grin is broad and slow to travel, as though fuelled only gradually by the rising hilarity of her denial. To his surprise, she flickers a grin right back at him before getting it under control. He points at her. “I saw that, too.”

“The scowling? Like this?”

“No!” He moves toward her, propelled by the force of his own laugh. “Shepard.”

She holds a hand out in front of her with a smile, and he stops, still halfway across the cargo bay. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to, Kaidan,” she says seriously, “but anything you _think_ you saw here -- you’re better off forgetting about it.”

“Because it never happened,” he says.

“Right.” She nods. “Nothing to see here.”

“No reason for spectators.”

“No performance to spectate. Just cleaning my gun.”

Kaidan nods to show his understanding, seriousness creeping back into his face. “Okay,” he says. “But if you _were_ dancing…”

“No.”

“...I’m just saying that it would be a really great thing.”

“I’ll take that into consideration.”

“It was really beautiful, Shepard.” The smile flickers back on, all sincerity, this time. “What were you humming? Was that Beethoven?”

She gives him a slow blink. “Any _Mozart_ you may have heard was purely your imagination, Alenko.”

“Right.” He nods vigorously and walks backward toward the lift. “I’ll just leave you to your dead silence, then.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem.” 

Any smile she might have shot him disappears when she looks to the floor and moves back to her gun, and he turns away, looking at his own feet as he shoves his hands into his pockets and heads back into the lift.

Given the hour, Kaidan allows himself the luxury of standing with his head against the cool metal of the lift when it stops on Deck 3, his eyes closed, for several long minutes; then -- Vancouver dreams be damned -- he opts to crawl back into bed, in the hopes he may wake up with a better grip on his ability to manage his emotions given a couple extra hours of sleep.

  


  


  


**iii.**

Shepard puts a hell of a lot of effort into pretending not to know how to dance. Kaidan sees that now.

He’s expected to keep a straight face when Shepard is compelled by Tali, who’s all hips and swivel, to join her for a second on the dance floor when they’re jogging through Purgatory one day. He remembers her shuffling two-step from three years ago; it was a point of frequent conversation on the Normandy, as though here, _finally_ , was proof that the woman herself was definitively _human_. She can tear a guy apart with a warp field, she can shoot a moving target in the head with a heavy pistol and a second to focus her eyes in a single shot, but she doesn’t have a graceful bone in her body. 

_Beautiful._ The woman has an imperfection. Reliably, Kaidan had been endeared to her further with this knowledge. 

But he’s known better for some time, hasn’t he? One doesn’t generally master combat in the way she has without having some understanding of timing. Hadn’t he heard her counting to herself any number of times -- firing her gun on the count of ‘four’, leaping over barriers on ‘three’, throwing a warp on ‘one’ to land perfectly on ‘three-and’? On occasion, Shepard was capable of clearing a room very nearly on her own, taking point with a fluidity of movement that had meant her shield hadn’t even been touched, while Kaidan and other squadmates had primarily fired off shots only at enemies Shepard literally couldn’t see. 

So -- he’s seen it, the fact that she has both grace and rhythm, even before he considers how many times she’s flipped him effortlessly over in the bedroom. Not that Kaidan thinks about that anymore, ever. Professionalism, and madness that way lies, and… et cetera.

So Shepard’s shuffling two step… yeah... is probably a ruse.

It’s obvious, to look at her now on Purgatory’s dance floor. The way her arms float loosely at her sides, the turn of her hips as she steps with the left, then with the right foot, out of time with herself… it’s such a precise performance of ignorance about how the body works that it _must_ be put upon, given her other capabilities.

Tali is laughing, hips pivoting joyfully, as though to better contrast Shepard’s own stilted movements. She takes one of Shepard’s hands in her own and holds it up, breaking Shepard’s carefully constructed rhythm; and in the next second Shepard’s foot catches her imbalance with unmistakable timing. There’s a moment when her opposite hip picks up the slack, moving her up and over in a steady arc, before she shuffles back into a seemingly false stumble; and Kaidan has as much proof as he’s gonna need that even _tripping_ is an intentional element of her façade.

Or -- is Kaidan’s imagining all this, out of sheer desperation to see something beautiful in the middle of so much destruction? It seems possible. Maybe he’s hallucinating; god only knows what neural decay his chip’s getting up to these days. To interpret Shepard’s stumble -- something that could plausibly be real, given the thirty pounds of armour she’s still wearing and the ardent complaints that had preceded her pursuit of Tali onto the floor about being worn out from the previous day’s battle -- instead as something intended to _deceive_ seems pretty bonkers.

Still, as he leans against the nearest wall and crosses his arms to watch them from afar, Shepard meets his eye only once. With just as much immediacy, she purses her lips and looks away again, as though to better focus on acting as unbalanced and unsteady as she can.

It’s not a sign that he’s right.

Unless it is.

He mulls all this over for the couple of minutes it takes Shepard to give Tali a pained expression and excuse herself reasonably from the floor; and when he feels himself taking a breath as they come back, he knows he’s about to do something stupid.

It’s not like _Kaidan_ can exactly dance -- he’s been fairly square in stature since his mid-twenties, and there’s not a hell of a lot of refinement he can really bring to the fact of being a wall. He’s great at being a wall, too, so he doesn’t really try to be anything else most of the time; but it is possible that he had been compelled, briefly, to attend ball dancing lessons in an attempt to be a better date to a bridesmaid at a wedding once. It’s possible that he practiced one move over and over to make sure that he wasn’t going to be a total disaster. It’s possible he still remembered every step of that one move, seared into his memory such as it was by the extreme force of will he’d brought to not tripping over himself in front of dozens of people.

It’s possible this expired, fuzzy knowledge is inspiring within him an insurmountable hubris in this moment. It’s possible that hubris is bringing him to step forward and put his hand at Shepard’s hip as he crowds her back onto the dance floor; and it’s possible that the smirk spreading over his face and the way she met his eye with a menacing severity from the first moment of his touch had sealed his fate from the get-go.

“What,” she mutters thickly when Kaidan sweeps her forward, the beginning of a question lost easily in the stumbled grapevine she’s forced into by the strength of his lead; but a second later, she’s caught up to him, her arm bracing his own more for support than anything else as he sweeps her from point to point. She’s peculiarly confident in the way her feet find a way to plant in-rhythm before she remembers she’s not supposed to be good at this, but Kaidan, like the asshole he is, takes her momentum in trying to regain enough lead to stumble properly and uses it against her. 

He propels her forward, spinning her easily away from him; and she besets an absolutely murderous glare upon him as she scrabbles against his armour for something to hold onto as he dips her into a back bend. Her weight’s wholly supported by his arm grasping at her hip, and as he holds her there with a grin battling for purchase on his face, she holds her hand firm to the back of his neck as though threatening to bring him down with her should he let her fall. 

Yeah. He’s an idiot. Apart from potentially starting a war with a woman he’s only recently gotten back on solid ground with, he also hasn’t been this close to Shepard for literal months -- and _there’s_ that flush he misses, that spark in her eye, when he leans his face close into hers and somehow has to prevent himself from kissing her.

“Gotcha,” he husks instead. He remembers why he’s here, all right, but he can’t quite seem to get the shit-eating grin to replace the seriousness of lust surging within him; and the double-meaning in his sentence has been readily obscured by the fact that he just wants her to know, now, that he won’t let her fall -- that he wouldn’t let her fall.

“Careful, Major,” Shepard’s muttering through her teeth. If she’s cottoned on that he’s doing more than just challenging her to admit her ability to dance, it’s not showing on her face.

He finds a laugh left in his lungs and breathes it out through -- at last -- a smile, if an excessively affectionate one for the competition he’s trying to instill. “Or what? You’ll _stumble_ out of--”

But the rest of Kaidan’s sentence is cut off abruptly as Shepard hooks her elbow around his neck; and, with an impossible momentum that Kaidan will spend a considerable amount the next week trying to figure out, she kicks herself up and over his back, twisting herself around him until her feet land on the other side of him. Before he has a chance to locate his centre of gravity, she grabs his armour and drags him after her; and when he figures out where he is, it’s on the floor, staring at the ceiling, dizzy with the rate at which he’s just been thrown to his back.

Shepard comes into view above him as he blinks himself right again, and the smirk on her face the closest thing to amused he’s seen from her in weeks. “Sorry, what was that? Were you saying something, before I owned you?”

Kaidan blinks at her another couple times, incredulous and fond; but then he laughs, a deep wheezing sound that proves to him he only barely kept the wind in his lungs. “I deserved that,” he mutters.

“Yeah,” she agrees; but then she offers a hand to let him up, and he takes it, shaking his head at her incredulously.

Kaidan waves to the crowd that’s stopped to stare, and he follows her out of the club, jogging to catch up. “Hell, Shepard,” he mutters, stepping close beside her. Her footsteps are, as usual, in time with the beat, and that’s just one thing too many for him to try to process right now. “What are you, an assassin? Natasha Romanov, is that you?”

“Who’s Natasha Romanov?”

“Nevermind. I think you gave me whiplash.”

“Well, you started it.”

“I guess I did.” He glares at her. “But would you _really_ rather beat me up in public than admit--”

“Admit what?” Shepard says loudly, drowning him out. “Regardless: yes, absolutely. That was better than sex.”

“Better than--!” Kaidan gapes at her. “You’d rather _beat me up_ than _fu_ \--”

“I missed something,” Tali interrupts, appearing by Shepard’s other side as they walk out of the club. “What was that all about?”

Kaidan bites down hard on his lower lip. “Nothing.”

“Just reminding Major Alenko who’s in charge around here,” Shepard says smugly.

“Yeah,” Kaidan says, and he finds it in him to look at her again. God _damn_ , she’s good. “Okay. I get it. Your secret dies with me, Shepard.”

“Secret? What secret? That she can beat you in a fight?” Tali scoffs. “Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah.” He nods tightly and rubs a hand at his neck, wishing to god his boner would chill. “I guess they do.”

He vows to himself to let it drop, after that -- and for a long time, he does.

  


  


  


**iv.**

The war marches on.

The Normandy docks at the Citadel for what might be their last shore leave, and Kaidan tries not to think about it, but there’s the reality anyway: stark, solid, stalking. After a few days running final errands, finalizing his will with a lawyer (fucking grim), and finally settling on an appropriate bottle to drink in the event they actually pull through this after all, he heads to Purgatory, hoping but not really counting on running into someone he knows who might take pity on him and drink by his side. It’s his good fortune when Traynor pulls him back on his way out the door instead, begging him to take her away from the invitation from Shepard to play some cards; and, pleased for the company, he doesn’t spare any expense when it comes to buying the finer asari wines available at the club.

His friendship with Traynor is only on the one hand unexpected. Of all the people on the ship who are also in love with Shepard -- and the tally is, by his last count, considerable -- Traynor’s the only one who’s been as forthright about her own feelings as she has been accepting of his. Kaidan appreciates the transparency. Put a bunch of high-ranking Marines and other galactic heroes on a single ship and you get a whole bunch of repressed, capable time bombs trying to trip each other at the same time that they’re trying to help each other up. Traynor, at least, is as willing to try to drink herself out of her feelings in company as he is, and they’ve taken advantage of this shared predilection more times than either one of them cares to admit.

It’s a bizarre premise for a friendship, falling for the same person; but Kaidan doesn’t make friends easily in the first place, and the ones he does make tend to… you know. Die. Life is short and the galaxy is fragile. A mutual love of the woman most likely to save their lives is as good a reason to get along as any at this point.

Still, he pays, just in case it encourages Traynor to stick around instead of finding solace in a more physical relationship -- and so far as he can tell, it seems to work. They drink readily, but not with the aim of getting totally hammered. They are, as it happens, still important people; things happen unexpectedly; neither one of them would want to be left behind if they’re needed in a pinch. Still, there is an appropriate detachment they seek from their impending doom that fine asari wine provides all the readily. The Reapers are closing in, after all, the Crucible is getting built, and they have like two more missions to do. Then, probably…

Probably, that’s it.

“Probably?!” Traynor half-shouts at him across a table, fourth drink in her hand. “What kind of spirit is that?”

“The realistic kind,” Kaidan replies. “Don’t get me wrong, I think Shepard’s probably gonna do it, but…”

“But what? The rest of us are just going to kick the bucket?”

“Well… yeah.”

“No!”

“Listen, it’s not what I _want_.”

“Then fight it!”

“I am! So are you! And so is everyone in the galaxy. It doesn’t make the fact that we’ll survive any more statistically likely. Humanity’s down to, what, 20% its former numbers at this point?”

“You should change your name to Downer because then everyone would call you Major Downer and that is what you are.”

Kaidan smiles at Traynor fondly. “You’re drunk,” he tells her.

“Just about!” she replies cheerfully. She swallows the rest of her drink in one, then frowns at the empty bottle on the table. “Well, the night’s young.”

“It’s fairly mature, actually.”

“Dear Lord, have you any joy left in you? I’m going to use the head. Try not to die of pessimism while I’m gone.”

Kaidan gives her a tight smile as she flutters off down the stairs, leaving him to watch the dance floor in peace.

He really hadn’t tried to follow up with Shepard since the last time she floored him here. Whatever her reasons, it was pretty clear that she wanted to keep the fact of her obvious background in dance quiet. Kaidan’s best theory -- not that he’s thought about it _excessively_ , per se -- is exactly rooted in why she’d faked not being able to dance in the first place: she’d wanted to give the impression of being bad at _something_ , even if it is something she is in fact very good at. This seems the most likely, and yet seems also the most ridiculous, reason for concealing one’s talents at something so benign he’s been able to come up with.

In honesty, the fact that he was so clearly being led by his dick had been what had discouraged him from following up further and confirming or denying this theory. No one, after all, needed their ex-boyfriend badgering them about how how they move their bodily form, especially not at the same time as they were trying to save the galaxy -- that much, at the _very_ least, wasn’t lost on Kaidan. So for his own peace of mind as well as Shepard’s, he’d left her the hell alone -- cut off all flirtation, shut down all flickers of interest he’d taken to showing her that had been anything other than professional, even to the point of turning his face away every time Shepard was moving with what Kaidan even began to suspect was anything other than military exactitude.

It doesn’t help that he sees Shepard dancing _everywhere_ , now -- in the mess, reaching for something across a table, or in how her weapon arcs over her back when she’s taking it out of its holster. His disengagement probably strikes more than just himself as a little unnatural, but if Shepard’s noticed it, she’s doing as good a job as he is at pretending that nothing’s out of the ordinary, and that is suiting them both just fine.

Kaidan listens to music a lot more, he finds -- that’s all. The only change. An innocuous side-effect of his newfound knowledge ( _suspicion_ , he corrects himself) about the Commander leading the charge against the biggest threat the galaxy’s ever seen.

He taps his thumb idly on his boot and tries to distract himself from the woman on the dancefloor who reminds him of Shepard.

She’s been catching his eye for the last forty minutes, and Kaidan’s done a _bang-up job_ , if he does say so himself, of pretending he doesn’t notice her. She’s about two-thirds of the way across the dance floor, blonde and a few inches shorter than he is; it’s just that she’s _shown up_ so much more than everyone else there. She’s swiveling her hips, grasping at transient dance partners, then shaking her head and removing them from her person with as much firmness as is required when they start getting just this side of too-handsy. She knows what she wants; she isn’t there in a stupor. She is as present as anyone he’s ever seen trying to dance, and he only has respect for that. The tug deep in his gut is telling him he wants _part_ of it.

But he doesn’t. He’s not a good dancer. He’s a brick wall.

Traynor comes back and slaps her hand down on the table.

“Heeyyy,” she says slowly. Her fingers are intermingled with those of a woman he’s never seen before. “So, seeing as this might be our _last shore leave ever…_ ”

“Go,” he says to her, affectionate. “Have a nice time. Try to get back before we push off tomorrow… or don’t, actually, if you feel the sudden urge to live.”

She sneers at him. “Charming,” she says; but then she sets a gentle hand on his knee. “You sure you’ll be all right?”

“Yeah,” he says, and waves a hand. “I thought I’d be here by myself anyway.”

“Gloomy,” Traynor frowns. “I’ll come back.”

“No she won’t,” offers her new friend.

Kaidan smiles. “I hadn’t believed her to begin with, but thanks,” he tells her.

“Listen, don’t ruin this for me,” Traynor hisses to him; and in the next second they’re gone, leaving Kaidan’s eyes with nothing better to do than to fall on the blonde dancer again.

Her back is to him. She moves so fluidly. His foot starts tapping; something stirs in his hips.

He’s alone. It’s the last shore leave he might ever have.

Kaidan gets to his feet.

It’s amazing, he thinks, how just discovering Shepard can dance has made Kaidan all the more willing to make a public spectacle of himself by doing same. He tends so often to be caught in public spectacle _anyway_ more than makes up for any urge he could ever otherwise have to be _noticed on purpose_ \-- but there’s something to be said for end-of-the-world solace. If he’s avoiding Shepard and she’s not going out of her way to find him, either, what’s the harm in finding comfort elsewhere, regardless of his feelings? Only he would ever be the one to know that he’d bothered to go out of the way to find a warm body to hold against him, even if it only went as far as the dance floor, in his final days.

As he crosses the floor to get to her, his hand scan against various backs. The asari wine seems to hit him all at once, with each touch of flesh or heat going straight to his head; yet the woman in the centre of the dance floor remains the focus of his attention, and he doesn’t bother to look at anyone else as he passes. With more confidence than he’s ever before possessed while on his way onto a dancefloor, he finds his way behind her -- slips his hands over her hips, and sets his hips flush against her the way he’d watched the rotating cast of dance partners do before him, and moves in the rhythm she sets, without ever seeing her face.

This woman does not look like Shepard. She doesn’t quite move like Shepard, either, with a laid-back edge delaying each cant of her hips as though to lean just on the edge of each beat instead of in time with it. But, _fuck him,_ she _smells_ like Shepard, and while it’s not impossible that two women on the entire Citadel could conceivably wear the same perfume it still gives him pause, for the occasional split second, as the beat pulses on in his ears. Kaidan looks to the wrong colour of her hair, reminds himself that Shepard’s playing cards on the Normandy, and accepts reality -- tries to lose himself in _this_ moment, the one that’s really happening, instead of losing himself in a fantasy full of predilections Shepard would never show him.

His dance partner’s hands reach back and find his skin, one hand tangling in his hair, the other covering his own hand at her hip. She responds _so well_ to his touch, clasping her fingers around his and grinding back into him without inhibition. It feels _good_ , like exactly what he needs, he hasn’t given enough of himself to anything approaching sensuality lately and its abundance here is -- _so_ good, _god,_ to think he could enjoy something so anonymous and outside his skillset is beyond absurd to him, but here he is, and here she is, leading him deeper into it.

He lets her drag him further and further in, and maybe she senses this isn’t his domain or maybe she feels attracted to him in the same way he’s been compelled to her, because she brings his head down until his lips are set against her neck and _grips_ in his hair, as though encouraging more to develop between them. A noise clears the back of his throat with the weight of her desire, and he sucks something into the clavicle of this woman he’s just met without another second’s hesitation, because --

He might die alone.

He might die alone, and yet his regrets are so few. Hasn’t he made it here, after all? He’s made his amends with Shepard. They’ve gotten to the point where they could mock each other, even, their sordid past finally evaporated by the sands of time; and now he’s part of her crew, poised to make a real difference in the universe, by her side. He is in love with her, true, and he is going to die alone anyway, and he might really die without ever knowing for sure if she can actually fucking _dance_ and that makes him crazier on a daily basis than he wants to admit, but -- they’ve come so far. They’ve done good work.

This is his last shore leave. There is no coming back to this club after tonight. So he allows himself to get lost in -- this. In her. He lets himself give in.

Her body is hot against his. Lust pounds through him with every brush of her against him, taut fabric, heavy bass, her hand gripping at his hair and preventing his lips from leaving her -- and _she_ makes the noise when his hand creeps under the hem of her shirt and spreads against the hot skin of her stomach as he holds her yet closer. He kisses a trail up her neck, mutters in her ear, “Is this okay?” --

And the woman tears abruptly away and turns, eyes wide, to look at him.

Kaidan blinks in instantaneous recognition.

It -- _is_ Shepard.

They stare at each other for four wrenching beats before either one of them remember to move -- then Shepard breaks first, her eyes tearing from his, moving to a spot on the floor in that familiar mortification. Kaidan’s instincts kick in a second later, just as they’d led them to her in the first place without even knowing it was her, and he steps forward, unflinchingly, to catch her arm as she turns to flee the dance floor.

She looks up at him with wide eyes, and Kaidan mutters, “Stop.” His voice surely inaudible over the music, but he trusts that she can read his lips; and her eyes tick up from where they’d settled on his mouth to look into his eyes instead, and he adds, “I won’t tell anyone,” beseeching her with his eyes not to abandon this sanctuary she’s carved out for herself.

It isn’t just that Shepard’s wearing a wig; the alterations to her face are more considerable than that. Kaidan wonders, on some level of himself that he hates, if she’s found a way to sync with the cybernetics in her face to create a new look. He’d known it was her when she’d turned from the look in her eyes, from the carve of her cheekbone and the dip of her chin; but she could just as easily be mistaken for anyone else, entirely anonymous, to anyone who didn’t know her as well as he does.

“Please stay, Shepard.” He drops her wrist, and it falls loosely to her side, as though she doesn’t know what to do with it absent the support. “I don’t want to ruin this for you. I’ll leave if you want. You deserve to stay.”

Her jaw clenches in a way that is distinctly _Shepard,_ even through the changes to her face, as she stares at him.

“I needed a break,” she says, as though explaining herself. 

He’s still drunk on the smell of her, on the feel of her skin under his lips, and all he wants is to take her back into his arms, but he only reads her words and nods. “You deserve it,” he repeats. “Will you stay?”

Shepard stares, blinks at him, another several beats; then, slowly, with wide and earnest eyes, she reaches to grab his hand by the fingers and wraps them slowly, firmly, back around her waist.

“Will you?” she asks back.

Kaidan blinks his disbelief until Shepard grabs his other hand, places it on her other hip, and wraps her arms around his neck. 

_So, not misunderstanding, then._

“Is that what you want?” he mutters; but even as he does his fingers flex and then tense against Shepard’s hips, relishing in the shape of them against his palms.

Shepard nods. She moves one hand to _his_ hip, then, and encourages him to move; and in the seconds that follow they find the rhythm they’d abandoned, easily, comfortably, until he figures out her lead can only do so much. 

_He_ leads, then, one hand moving to cup her face as he kisses her. Before long, his thigh is poised between her legs, her hips grinding down against him with each passing beat; and the taste of brandy is sharp and intoxicating on her tongue, so he deepens the kiss, keeps her moving rhythmically against him, until time shuts down and all he can feel is Shepard.

It’s not lost on Kaidan that she’s only allowing any of this because she doesn’t look like herself. If Shepard is here, dancing, in public, having gone to all this trouble to be unrecognizable just to make it happen… he has an idea of what she must be trying to achieve. She wants to be -- lost. She wants to let go. She wants to lose herself.

And now Kaidan is lost in her -- dizzy and drunk and fucking delirious over the scorching heat of her skin under his fingers. His hand climbs up her back, supporting her as she takes what she wants from him in the rhythm of the beat; and he wants to give her everything at the same time that he wants all of her. He wants never to leave this place. He wants to offer her so much more life than the weeks they have left.

Her hands are clenched in his hair and braced across the back of his neck as she uses him as her support, and his other hand stays clasped against her hip, feeling her move at that laid-back pace. The occasional stutter of her hips tells him that she is taking what she wants to the point of arousal, and he is so fucking hard, lust builds and plateaus, he is taken by Shepard and the weight of her need and he wants her so bad but neither does he want to move.

It’s Shepard who manages to break their trance first -- she pulls back, sets her forehead against him with her eyes closed, and he knows that she’s still living only for the beat, for his leg between hers. “Want to get the hell out of here?” she mutters against her ear, her voice worn to the quick by desire; and Kaidan finds it in him to tear away from her far enough to look her in the eye, to figure out if she’s really asking him this.

She is.

Oh, fuck, he loves her.

But they’re dying. It’s their last fucking shore leave. So why the hell not?

Kaidan kisses her, once, as deeply as he can, in case he can warn her of his passion; and then he grabs her by the hand and leads her out of the club, doing his level best to survive the minutes until he can get her scorching skin back under his wanting hands.

  


  


Kaidan never got rid of his apartment from the months he’d lived here while completing his spec ops training 18 months earlier. It was a money suck, but since the Reapers were coming, he’d found it difficult to care. Now he thinks it might’ve been the best decision he’s ever failed to make.

This is -- unreal. This is stupid. Kaidan’s definitely drunk, halfway to losing his mind with Shepard’s hands climbing under _his_ shirt, now, in the rising elevator -- but it’s probably his last chance to make a stupid fucking mistake, so by god he’s gonna take it.

He checks in with her even as he’s backing her down the hall toward his door. “Are you sure about this?” he mutters against her lips, just as he’d checked with her in the elevator -- half-heartedly, holding her against the wall, with one of her legs wrapped around his waist,as they’d done their level best at devastating one another around mumbled concerns about the suddenness of this rekindled affair.

“I’m sure,” she’d said then, and she says it again now -- repeats the words again, carried by an exhale, some note of desperation underscoring each syllabus as though to summarize his own. It hits Kaidan as hard as everything else has, the fact that Shepard wants him _like this_ , and he is sent moaning hungrily into her mouth, his feet barely shuffling toward his door with their preoccupation as he tries to remember what’s required to open this apartment door.

Shepard’s hands rest on his bare chest when he sets her against the wall beside his unit, and when he pauses to press his thumb to the keypad outside his door, it’s with his earlobe between her lips.

“Welcome home, Kaidan Alenko,” chimes the VI upon their stumbled entry. “Facial recognition protocols--”

“No,” rumbles Kaidan absently; then he extricates himself from Shepard for long enough to throw his gaze to the ceiling. “VI disable.”

The VI chimes distantly as it turns off, and he slams the door shut behind him. Something snaps anew; and now, finally here in private, Kaidan’s breath hitches as his hands trail up and under her skirt to grab at her ass, both cheeks plump and firm under his palms, and Shepard’s breath mirrors his. He moves to devastate her mouth, lips hot on hers, one hand fiddling absently at her skirt’s zipper; and it’s with shaking hands that he finally gets it down, cants it over her swiveling hips, his fingers finding the heat of her through sodden cotton as her skirt hits the floor.

Her head falls suddenly to rest on his shoulder, and he strokes the pads of his fingers against her -- he can _smell_ her, Shepard and arousal and sweat and alcohol, and oh dear _god_ in heaven he’s never been so happy to be dying in his life.

It’s all too fast; he doesn’t want to do it like this. He moves his hand away from between her legs; and she manages to look up, eyes heavy with need as they meet Kaidan’s, her hands bracing on either side of Kaidan’s neck as though she has some supreme need to steady herself through all this.

“Nice place,” Shepard rasps ironically. Kaidan gives a gentle laugh -- presses sucking kisses down to the curve of her shoulder, runs his fingers along her lower back under the drape of her shirt, and tries to revel in this, remember this, if it’s the last time he might have her like this.

“It’s convenient,” he says. She’s familiar and unfamiliar at once, her eyes the same piercing pair he’s known all these years, and yet her face is of someone else, someone not of this life, and Kaidan can’t quite help but to feel suddenly disconnected.

“It’s up to you,” he says then, “but would you like to take off your prosthetics?”

She blinks at him, then mutters, “Oh, Christ,” reaching behind her and pulling something out of her hair in the next instant. Suddenly, her brown hair replaces itself; her features return to their usual curvature, and the relief Kaidan feels must be apparent on his face for the sudden compassion Shepard shows him. “I’m sorry, Kaidan,” she says softly, and puts the device on the nearest surface. “I forgot.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says, tangling his hands in the lengths of her locks. _God,_ she’s beautiful like this -- just herself, in front of him. “What, um… is that?”

“Imagine tech armour,” she says, running her fingers through his hair in turn, and she’s smiling gently at him, utterly unperturbed by the sudden emotional intimacy of the moment. “It just adds an image overtop of my actual features to reflect light along different lines.”

Kaidan nods. “You can wear it if you want,” he says; but she only shakes her head at him, one hand moving to pat affectionately at his face.

“I didn’t expect it to be you, Kaidan,” she says, “but I’m glad it was.”

His hands brace back over her ass and _grip_ over lines of black cotton, and her eyes close against a smile. “I should’ve _known_ it was you,” she continues, her voice low, as his hands trace the lines of her hips over and over again, barely believing they’re the same ones to have moved against him twenty minutes earlier. “Way you moved with me.”

“I should’ve know it was _you,_ ” he replies, moving his fingers up and under her shirt, over the slopes of her back. “Way you moved. Way you felt.”

“You really didn’t?”

“Not consciously,” he murmurs. “You had my attention. Watched you for a while, but I thought you just… reminded me of... it doesn’t matter.”

“Is that why you came to me? Because I reminded you of… me?”

“Yeah.” He pulls her shirt off, gently, but touching her all the while -- drawing lines with his fingers up the course of her form. “Only had eyes for you. Weird like that.”

“You didn’t follow me?”

“No, god, no. Sam said you were on-ship. I assumed you were.”

“Mm.” She sighs as he ducks to kiss her breasts where they swell over the line of her bra, his hands steadied against her torso. “Part of my ruse.”

“Clever,” he tells her, his lips cracking into a smile against her skin. “You do this often?”

“No,” she mutters; then, as her hands pull at his shirt until it peels off his arms, “just once before, before I went to Earth. After... Cerberus.”

He hums; puts Cerberus out of his mind; remembers Shepard’s here and she’s warm and she _wants him_ and he’s going to die. “Why do you hide it?” he asks; and it seems that this, above all else, is the final answer he needs from her before they head together into the abyss.

“Hide what?”

“That you can dance.”

She looks at him as he stands to look at her; her eyes are her own, big and deep and with that spark he’s missed so much. “Bygones,” she tells him, voice low; but then Kaidan’s fingers remember how bras work and Shepard is kicking off her shoes, so he focuses on moving again, backing her into the main room of his flat, finger and thumb rolling her nipples gently between them.

“Okay,” he mutters against her lips, and then he kisses her, gently at first, then ever deeper, building the heat between them back up until she’s backed against another wall. Her leg is wrapped around his waist again, and Kaidan is rutting helplessly against her, and she tries to say, “Will you,” she tries to say, “Will you please--” 

But Kaidan’s primary reply is just to grab her other leg off the ground, to wrap it around his waist, too, and to press her against the wall as her only point of contact apart from him. Her hands wrap into his hair; they clench; they don’t allow him a centimetre of give, force him to hold her to him with as much power as she brings him into her. Her heels press into the small of his back, and, _fuck,_ he loves that, the feeling of her heat against his chest and her feet encouraging him to lean deeper, and he is left only to kiss her as Shepard’s hands find the clasp of his pants, even at this awkward angle. She succeeds, because she would, and she shimmies them off his hips even as he’s holding her aloft.

Kaidan’s mouth falls open to a breaking sound in his throat as her fingers wrap around his girth. “I, uh,” he says, then swallows; and he gives up in the next moment when his next attempt at speech results only in cracking noises. He kisses her, then, trying not to rut into her hand as he pries her underwear to one side with his finger; and she scrambles to unsheath him from the various layers of cotton between them. He clears his throat deeply, detaching from her to swallow, then he opens his mouth and mutters against her neck. “Shepard, I--” 

But he’s interrupted when her hand wraps more fully around his cock, bare, skin on skin, and he tests the part between her folds with two gentle fingers instead of finishing his thought. He’s fucked up beyond belief with how wet she is, how it follows his fingers as he pulls them away; and in the moments that follow, there’s only a fumbling silence punctuated by desperate breath as they hitch and adjust until he is pushing slowly, slowly, deeply into her, with her still pressed against the wall, ankles over his shoulders.

Shepard is -- flushed. She is so beautiful. She is full with desire and adrenaline and energy, and she is looking at him with a parted mouth, one hand still braced around his neck, the other resting against his chest. He holds her eye as though to let her know that he’s _got her_ , he holds it still as he pushes in, bit by bit, as she takes him, until he pulls away and pushes back in and she takes him again; and when he is well and truly sheathed within her, he braces his hand firm against her back and steps away from the wall, to hold her as though weightless, fucked on his dick and utterly at his whim.

Shepard looks so fucking drunk on desire, staring at him with the kind of look that almost encourages to drop his plan and fuck her as thoroughly as she so clearly wants from him, but god help him, god _help_ him, he wants to draw this out as long as he can. He takes two steps forward, with her supported only by his hands and by his cock buried in her.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” Kaidan tells her. He kisses her, then, lets her grip and pull at his hair, before he pulls her back by the hips with torturous slowness. She comes off his cock only as far as he lets her, and then she settles back down again onto him, his hands guiding the motion until he’s tighter inside her than he began. “The way you moved against me in that club,” he mutters, his lips brushing against her skin, and he pulls her off him again, back on, as he talks. “Getting yourself off on me. I’ve never wanted you so much. Did you come, just from that? Could you have, if we’d stayed?”

Her reply is caught in some reedy moan as he pulls her off him again, and he takes that as answer enough. He’s got her, his fingers firm against her skin, as she balances with just barely the tip of him inside her; then he sets her slowly, slowly back down over him, her muscles quaking through her legs as he pushes back into her, her heels digging hard into his shoulders as though to arch herself into a better angle for entry.

“Fuck,” he says. “Look at you.”

And then he does look at her -- takes in every inch of her -- as he fucks her on and off his cock again and again. He does this until she is flushed down across her breasts, her skin hotter than it began, her fingers gripping tight against his arms and her legs quaking with every thrust, the pace so agonizing and giving her so little and so much of what she wants at once.

He kisses her, overjoyed, in love with her, and then sets her on her back on the bed at long last. He can’t help but to grin at her, to bury his face in her neck, as he moves over her and pumps into her with greater speed -- and when he finally hears those hitches in her breath that tells him she’s closer to where she needs to be, he leans back, coaxes her legs to set against the bed, and licks his thumb before setting it against her clit in slow, pressing circles.

She arches her back against the bed, resplendent, after such little time that he wonders how long she’s been close, the only clues that she’s coming in the ways she clenches around him and the moan she bites off in her throat, extended long; and it’s so _Shepard,_ all of it, so _beautifully_ Shepard, that he has to laugh.

“Fuck me,” he says to her, full of affection; then, because they’re going to die, he says, “I love you,” too; and if her only reply is to look at him with a bewildered expression and to kick him over until _he’s_ on _his_ back, with his wrists pinned to the bed and some look on her face like she’s about to pay him back for the hell he just put her through… 

Well.

 _That’s_ just so Shepard, too, in the same excruciating, bewildering way as everything else about her, that he could die here and now -- and be at peace.

  


  


  


**v.**

There’s a moment on Earth, just a moment, where she’s standing in the middle of the street and he sees her -- in stark reality, for the first time -- for the complete human being she is. 

It’s quiet in London, except that it’s loud. The nearest screams of Marauders and Husks too far off to be of concern, and the closest Reaper seems preoccupied, Kaidan supposes, with… harvesting. They’ve hunkered down in what used to be an office building, and Kaidan’s been trying to figure out how to command his spec ops squad from the ground while Shepard’s been making the rounds. She hasn’t only been thanking them for their service and their friendship and their support in the progress they’ve made, from the snippets he can discern; she’s actually saying _goodbye_ to everyone, in speeches so heart-rending that he has a hard time getting his voice to stay steady over the radio.

It’s clear, from how everyone is left pale and bracing their guns and on the brink of emotional collapse when Shepard leaves them, that she doesn’t expect to survive. In saying _goodbye_ to them, she is saying, _thank you for being part of this,_ and then walking away from them in what they both believe to be the last time with barely a look behind her.

On the one hand, she is a machine -- built for this mission, barely allowing herself to be human for it. But then again, Kaidan, despite an unparalleled ability to display all his flawed humanity at once, doesn’t actually expect to survive either, so in the end he has a really fucking hard time coming up with a pep talk to give her instead of a goodbye, when it comes time for them to have their chat.

Fortunately for him, she’s avoiding him; he figures she’s saving him for last, figuring out what she can say to him that won’t leave him suddenly realizing he outranks the shit out of her and that he can command her to hang behind the nearest security barricade if he thinks it might be safer. But on the other hand, Kaidan doesn’t actually have the luxury of time. None of them do, obviously, least of all Shepard; but with his spec ops squad on the ground, there’s a decision to make. 

He can’t help but wonder between fervent attempts at trying to contact his squad whether there’s something he should be doing to encourage her to live, rather than merely bracing himself for the goodbye he knows he’s not gonna be able to handle. So when the basics are settled with his squad and Shepard’s nowhere to be found, he goes looking for her, lest they die without actually telling each other to live first, as though it’ll make the slightest bit of difference either way. 

He finds her standing in the middle of an abandoned street, alone, with barricades and soldiers standing at either end of it. Blood and viscera paint the entire concrete breadth a dark, apocalyptic red, and Shepard is standing in the middle of the mess.

There are bodies on one side of the street, and shattered concrete on the other, as though to remind her of exactly all they’ve lost and all she failed to prevent. Her armour stands out between the red and the grey, the green tinted plates the only other splash of colour for meters; and her arms are loose by her sides, one hand gripped around her pistol, her finger at the trigger, in case she needs unexpectedly to use it.

A Reaper moans in the distance. Shepard doesn’t even stir.

Kaidan takes a second -- as she has -- to watch her.

She’s is thirty feet away from him, several feet down; he’s standing atop some concrete foundation, a pedestrian bridge, half collapsed and crumbling into the street below. There’s not another living soul around her. She stands alone, staring at some point in the middle of the road, or maybe at the arm that looks to have belonged to a husk or else to some other poor fucking bastard whose decaying humanity had left his skin scaly and grey.

When several long moments have passed, of Shepard watching the road and of Kaidan watching Shepard, she looks suddenly up, straight ahead; and then, as though sensing him there for the first time, she turns her head to find him.

Her eyes are wide, and clear, and scared.

He realizes in the next second that he’s standing just like her -- his pistol poised in one hand, but otherwise wholly consumed by the tension of grief at everything that’s here and unsalvageable. They’re about to walk into the thick of the Reaper forces, and they do it knowingly -- they do it knowing that _this_ is what they left behind all those months ago, that they still don’t stand a fucking chance, and that this, somehow, is at once the last stand.

Kaidan holds her gaze and doesn’t say a word.

“Figure skating,” she says to him, suddenly. As though to prove the point, she skates one foot out long in front of her in a wide arc, using the guts and innards as the slippery stand-in for a rink. Her weight switches from one foot to the other; she gives a brief backwards shift of her feet, the phenomenon almost an exact replica on the fluid concrete as she might’ve managed on ice.

She needn’t say any more. Kaidan understands.

“No dance classes at all?” he asks gently, with a carrying voice.

“Not since I was a kid. A little kid, I mean. Took ballet for a year when I was five. It’s all pretty similar, though.”

He offers her a devastated half-smile. For this woman to die, after all this… “You win any awards?” he asks her, instead of breaking down.

“You, Major Alenko, are looking at Miss Minnesota, 2163.”

“Oh my god. The legend herself.”

Her face falls to the ground as she gives a ghost of a laugh; but just as instantly the smile drops from her face, her eyes tracking against the devastation she’d dared to forget even for a second. When she looks up at him again, he sees only a scared woman standing in the streets of London.

Kaidan can’t take it anymore. Someone’s calling his name far behind him, maybe Vega or someone trying to hound him for an answer about whether he’s gonna lead the Biotic League already, but he shakes his head against it. He crouches against the wall, braces himself to fall the ten feet down to Shepard’s level, and sheathes his pistol before he jumps. No regrets. _No regrets._

“Hey,” he says as he approaches her, a hand coming out to take her own pistol from her hand. He puts it gently into her holster before setting his hand over the same hip, his right hand grabbing her left and holding it aloft in the air. “Can we do this properly, just once? Before we walk out into the depths one last time?” He doesn’t kiss her, but it’s a close thing. “I’ve always wanted to dance with you, Shepard. That’s all I was ever trying to do.”

And Shepard looks around them, as though it really matters whether anyone judges her now, here, slouching as they are into the end of days. “For a minute,” she mutters. Her gaze flutters down to his lips, but then she grabs at him in turn, shuffling her feet between his, leaning her head against his chestplate in the most openly vulnerable display he’s ever seen from her. 

Kaidan holds her close to him, in case _this_ may be enough to remind her to at least try to live. 

“And then we have to go,” she says, quietly, when a chorus of Reapers echoes in the distance.

Kaidan nods. He does press his lips against her skin, then -- gentle, against the top of her head, just to breathe her in properly one last time. “And then we have to go,” he agrees; and they sway the last of their lives together in the blood-stained streets.

  


  



End file.
